How did the ancient word “ohoyake” come to represent the present concept of “publicness”? Or how did it fail to do so? Originally “ohoyake” didn't mean something “public” against “private” but almost literally “the lord's mansion.” Rather “miyake” seems to be a more appropriate word for “publicness” because it referred to “imperial court.” Therefore “ohoyake” was a kind of oxymoron which comprises both official and communal implications in an intertwined fashion.

The aim of this article is to analyze a structural relation between the “public” and the “private” spheres in the narrative community of Genji-monogatari and then to explore a peculiar contrast of “private” against “private” in it. Indeed, the counterfactual “capability” of Genji-monogatari lies in the theme of sympathetic encounters between vulnerable personalities because it points to the possibility of a new communal space which transcends both “public” and “private” spheres.

Shin-kokin-waka-shū is a collaboration of Gotoba-In and Fujiwara-no-Teika. But their relation was far from good and they blamed each other for what they each regarded as self-indulgence in the official work of compiling an imperial poetry collection. Ironically enough, however, their confrontation over “public” and “private” played an important role in the completion of the collection. A similar binary logic also worked as a primary factor in the compilation of the “Oki-bon” edition which was motivated by Gotoba-In's private desire to return to an official career from his obscure life in exile.

Unlike modern fiction Ihara-Saikaku's “novels” didn't treat individuals but society itself to expose violence inherent in it. Such public violence is most vividly represented in “Hitoniwa-bōfurimushi-dōzen-ni-omoware,” one of the episodes of Saikaku-okimiyage. The episode provides us an opportunity to review the violent nature of society where we now live.

Interpreted in terms of the binary opposition of “public” and “private,” Cain-no-matsuei is a story about “public” power ruthlessly oppressing “private” desire. Niemon accepts his weakness after the experience of frustrated ambition and decides to live a “weak” life with his wife. His choice of such a lifestyle suggests a possibility of a new form of communal space which may provide a clue to a way out of rampant violence in our society.

In the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s, family, sex, and other “private” spheres were radically challenged because, under the slogan of “the personal is political,” they were regarded as the very source of female oppression. In a sense Fumiko Hayashi already practiced such radical feminism. In her novels Hayashi often sublimated her own private experiences of hunger, thirst, weeping, infatuation, and other physical conditions into something excessive that threatens the order of the public sphere. In other words, she sought after a “third term” which lies beyond our cognition.

The modern system of controlling female body is now economically applied to every-body in the age of neoliberalism. In his short stories “Hadaka-no-café” and “Zannen-na-chikubi,” however, Hajime Yokota seems to suggest an alternative model to it. Body is there represented within an epistemological framework quite different from that of the public sphere where it cannot exist without being commodified into another material.